Debussy's Late Style.(Book review)

* Debussy's Late Style, by Marianne Wheeldon. Indiana University Press, 2009. www.iupress.indiana.edu; (800) 842-6796; 184pp. $34.95.

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Did you know that Debussy wrote both words and music for a song, very popular in wartime France, about the struggles of orphans during the First World War? The song, Noel des enfants qui n'ont plus de maison (Noel for children who no longer have a home), was smuggled into Belgium during the war, hidden among manuscripts of German music. Or did you know that his last composition for piano, Les soirs illumines par l'ardeur du charbon (Evenings lit by the burning coals), written in May 1917, was a girl to the man who supplied him with coal? Because Debussy had no money and no coal to heat his home during that winter, he wrote the composition and convinced the coal supplier to accept it as payment.

These are just two of the intriguing facts that Marianne Wheeldon presents in her discussion of Debussy's late works, composed between 1914 and 1918. During those years Debussy was living through the German occupation of France and fighting his own battle against the cancer that eventually took his life. Wheeldon shows how his late works reflect the political milieu of that time and also his concern for his own legacy.

The book is divided into five chapters. Chapter one focuses on the external circumstances surrounding Debussy's wartime compositions, and discusses which works suggest a wartime response and which show no evidence of wartime influence at all.

The second chapter discusses those works ...